[throwaway201103]

Without question burning wood and similar biomass is better than burning coal. It has the issue of particulate pollution, but modern filtering technology on that is pretty good. It also has the risk of demand outpacing the rate at which new biomass can grow, but I don't know if we're anywhere close to that.

[Loic]

Not if you import your wood and biomass out of South America or Asia from "officially well maintained" forests. Cut the trees in your country and suddenly you can see how well maintained are the forest delivering enough wood to run combined heat/power plants.

You need a staggering amount of wood and if you want to produce them in a really sustainable way, you simply cannot. You would be able to produce such amount of wood nicely in a sustainable way, you would sell it for furniture or construction wood for way more money.

The only heat from wood I know are really well (not only on the paper) managed are the ones directly working with a network of sawmill to reuse the waste and usually, they are small.

[jakehop]

Better how? Scientists and professors with decades of experience in this exact field, disagree[0].

Burning wood even discharges more CO2 in the atmosphere, than coal[1] and we haven't even started to talk about where all those trees must be grown to keep up with the demand of an energy policy based on solar/wind + biofuel backup, like we are planning in Denmark.

It is not a terribly good idea and it is infuriating how little science and facts matter to a political discusssion that one would think was based around those elements.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/opinion/pruitt-forests-bu... [1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa512/...